News

WNCG professor Atlas Wang has received several grants for his work on artificial intelligence. 

WNCG alumnus Dr. Qi Lei has received the 2021 Oden Institute Outstanding Dissertation Award. Her winning dissertation, “Provably effective algorithms for min-max optimization," proposes optimization algorithms to find the equilibrium point of two-player zero-sum games. Read the dissertation abstract and find the link to the full text via the University of Texas Libraries. At WNCG, Lei was advised by Prof. Alex Dimakis; she was co-advised by Dr. Inderjit Dhillon from the University of Texas Department of Computer Science.

WNCG professor Aryan Mokhtari has received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study Computationally Efficient Second-Order Optimization Algorithms for Large-Scale Learning. The project “lays out an agenda to develop a class of memory efficient, computationally affordable, and distributed friendly second-order methods for solving modern machine learning problems.”

Prof. Robert Heath of Texas ECE along with his former students Jeonghun Park, Chan-Byoung Chae and their co-author Min Soo Sim have received the 2018 Journal of Communications and Networks Best Paper Award. The winning paper was “Compressed Channel Feedback for Correlated Massive MIMO Systems” that appeared in the February 2016 regular issue of the Journal. The award will be be presented during the Award Luncheon at ICC 2018, May 21, in Kansas City.

Prof. Al Bovik of Texas ECE and his former students Anish Mittal and Rajiv Soundararajan have received the 2017 Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award for their paper " “Making a “Completely Blind” Image Quality Analyzer” first published in IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Volume 20, No. 3, March 2013. Prof. Bovik and his students will receive the award at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Calgary in April 2018.

Xinnian Zheng, Ph.D student at Texas ECE along with Prof. Lizy John and Prof. Andreas Gerstlauer received the Best Research Paper Award at the 53rd Design Automation Conference (DAC) held in Austin, Texas in early June. The paper titled, “Accurate Phase-Level Cross-Platform Power and Performance Estimation” received the honor at the leading conference in electronic design automation (EDA).

Prof. Al Bovik and his former student Rajiv Soundararajan have been named recipients of the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Best Paper Award for 2016. The award recognizes their 2013 paper “Video Quality Assessment by Reduced Reference Spatio-Temporal Entropic Differencing,”  which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology in April 2013.

Texas ECE student Xinnian Zheng has received the "Stamatis Vassiliadis Best Paper Award" at the 15th International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling and Simulation (SAMOS) that took place in Samos, Greece on July 20-23, 2015. Xinnian's paper entitled "Learning-Based Analytical Cross-Platform Performance Prediction" employs machine learning techniques to predict the performance of a software workload running on a target machine using execution statistics collected while running the same application on a host platform.

UT ECE graduate student Romain Fleury has been named the recipient of the Best Student Paper Award in Engineering Acoustics at at the 168th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Indianapolis for his work on "Non-Reciprocal Acoustic Devices Based on Spacio-Temporal Angular-Momentum Modulation.” Romain had already been named the recipient of the "Young Presenter Award in Noise" at ASA earlier last month. Romain is supervised by Prof. Andrea Alù.

UT ECE graduate student Romain Fleury was awarded the Best Student Paper Award at the Metamaterials 2014 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on August 30, 2014. Romain is under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Alù, and was recognized for the paper "Parity-Time Acoustic Metamaterials and Unidirectional Invisible Sensors." Metamaterials 2014, the Eighth International Congress on Advanced Electromagnetic Materials in Microwaves and Optics, was held from August 25-30, 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and is the premier conference in the field.